


They always have a driver, don't they?

by Antecanis



Category: Longmire (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, not happy at all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-22
Updated: 2013-06-22
Packaged: 2017-12-15 17:44:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/852266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antecanis/pseuds/Antecanis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This fic takes place right after episode 2x04. Vic didn't come home after working late and is probably taken by whoever sent those flowers. It's now on Walt to find her in time, especially after what she just told him the day before...</p>
            </blockquote>





	They always have a driver, don't they?

**Author's Note:**

> Heyhey, another Walt x Vic, but this time not happy at all. Sorry. As always I'd like to say that English is not my mother tongue and I'm sorry for the mistakes I made for sure. Feel free to point them out! I hope you like this.  
> Oh and I forgot what name Vic's husband has to I called him 'Andrew'. Oops. Plenty of references in here, too.

Ruby, dispatcher of the Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department, wasn’t surprised anymore to find Walt Longmire fast asleep with his jacket as blanket in one of the holding cells. Since they hadn’t had a prisoner for months now, it had become one of his various habits she disapproved of.  
“Walt.”, she said softly but determined.  
He groaned and pulled his hat from his face. “Yeah? “ He rose slowly and stretched. “Oh, good morning, Ruby.”  
She handed him a mug. “Coffee. You’ll need it”  
Walt took the coffee without taking a sip. “Why do I need it? Did we get a new case while I was sleeping?”  
She shook her head and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “No. Walt, Vic’s husband called.”  
All of the sudden he felt quite awake even though he hadn’t had taken any sip of the coffee yet. “So?”  
“Vic didn’t come home last night.”  
Walt didn’t say anything, but placed the mug carefully on the bench. He got up and ran his hand over his face. “Did you try to call her?”  
Ruby gave him a stern look.  
“Alright. You did.” He grabbed his hat and took a deep sip of coffee before leaving the cell. “I’ll drive by their house and talk to… Andrew.”  
“What should I tell Branch? He should be here any minute.”  
Without turning back he said: “That Vic's missing.”

Walt tried to think of any normal reason why Vic would've stayed away from home the previous day . They worked late, something rare these days. It wasn’t a big case, just some paperwork they had to do to finish up on the last one. Vic seemed to be okay when she left shortly after eleven and Walt recalled that she left in her car, heading north, in the direction of her house. It hadn't been a normal evening, however. Walt tried to think of the conversation they had before she left the Sherriff's Department. He now wished she would've stayed with him.  
But she definitely didn’t come back to the station.  
When he arrived at Vic’s house, he could see a pale face looking out of the window. It had to be her husband Andrew, whom Walt only had met once. It had been quite awkward, Walt thought, even though there had been no obvious reason why it would’ve been that way.  
He got out of the truck and walked slowly towards the front door. Before he reached it, Andrew opened it from the inside and placed himself with arms crossed in the doorway.  
“Did you find her?”  
“Hello Andrew. No, we haven’t heard from Vic since she left last night around eleven. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”  
“No. Otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here, would I?” Andrew sounded angry and Walt couldn’t blame him.  
“I’m sorry. Did she mention any problems? Is there anything that could help me find her?”  
The other man straightened. He pressed his lips together and glanced into the distance.  
“Andrew?”  
“I… She… She got some flowers a few days ago.”  
“I know. Was that some kind of message?”  
“Yes… yes.”  
“Can you tell me what they meant? Would you mind if I come in?”  
Andrew looked Walt in the eyes and his expression looked almost hateful. “Yeah, I do mind. But I can tell you what those flowers mean. They mean they've found her.”  
It took Andrew more than half an hour to explain everything to Walt. They were standing in front of the house the whole time and when Walt left he was cold, not only because of the gusting wind.

The first thing Walt did was to get back to the station. He told Ruby and Branch, who had arrived in the meantime, everything he had just heard from Andrew. Ruby covered her mouth with her hand while listening to Walt. Branch’s expression didn’t change but he looked nevertheless concerned when Walt had ended his narration.  
“Branch. You check with highway patrol if Vic’s car has been found somewhere. Or if they had suspicious incidents last night, whatever. I want every available patrol officer to look out for Vic’s car. Everyone. Ruby, get Ferg down here. I know he’s fishing up in the mountains, but we need him here now. Call Dorothy in the Busy Bee’s café and ask her if she heard anything. Or if she had any guests from Philadelphia lately. I want her to make a list of strangers she has recently seen in her café, alright? Give out descriptions of that boss in case anyone has seen him.”  
Ruby nodded and Branch said, “Got it.” Walt could see that he wanted to know what Walt was up to, but he didn’t ask and Walt didn’t tell him.

What Andrew had told him was basically this: Back in Philly, Vic had shot a young drug dealer, who resisted his arrest and attacked her. However, it turned out that the man was the son of one of the gang bosses who ruled over the criminal world in Philadelphia. Shortly after the shooting Vic got threats and after someone tried to kill her, she left Philadelphia. At first she went to Vegas, where she had met Andrew and got married within months. For Andrew’s work they moved to Wyoming and Walt knew the rest of the story.  
There was not much he could do now. The highway patrol would look for Vic’s car and check Philly license plates coming through. But Vic was gone for at least nine hours now, so they could already be in another state if they had chosen to run.  
Walt hoped they only kidnapped her. If they did, they probably would do one of two things: Either they brought her down to Philly so that mob boss could kill her himself, or they brought her to some motel nearby and the boss was coming to Wyoming to finish off the cop who killed his son.  
It was more likely that they would stay here with her until that guy arrived simply because it was less trouble. Driving down to Philadelphia would take over one day and with a kidnapped woman that could be a damn long time. No, flying in the boss was easier and probably faster.  
I just hope the boss wants to kill her himself, Walt thought and felt his heart beat faster. That would mean I still have time. I can’t… lose her.

There were a few motels Walt had already in mind when he got into the car and left Durant. They would probably not stay right here, but enter one of the tiny neighbor towns where nobody asked questions.  
He checked motel after motel. At first he looked at the cars and where they were from. Then he walked up to the front desks and hold up his badge.  
“This is Sheriff Longmire. I need to know who checked in over the last few days…”  
He then looked through the lists of people who rented the rooms in the last week. It weren’t many because it wasn’t summertime yet. Snow was still falling from grey skies from time to time and the Bighorn Mountains were almost invisible in their misty cloaks of snow clouds.  
After three hours of unsuccessful search Walt called the Sherriff’s station from one of the phones in one of the motels.  
“Absaroka Sherriff’s Department, how can I help you?” Ruby sounded distressed.  
“Ruby, it’s me. Any news yet?”  
“Walt! Where are you? We’ve tried to reach you. Henry is here, he wants to talk to you.”  
“Okay.”  
He heard a rustling sound and then Henry’s calm voice. “Walt, where are you?”  
“I’m at the Silver Shoe Motel out on route…”  
“Yes, I am aware where that place is. Did you find anything?”  
Walt sighed. “No. I figured if they really got to her they might’ve taken her to some motel until their boss gets here.”  
He listened to fain voices in the background. “Walt.” Henry made a pause. “They found Vic’s car.”  
Walt straightened himself and ran a hand over his face, as if to rub off the fear he felt in every pore of his body. Please let her be alive.  
They had found her car not far from her house in Durant. It was parked in a back yard and only discovered because the owner of the property called the Sherriff’s office because the car blocked his alley way and he wanted to report it.  
“No sign of Vic?”  
“No.”  
“I gotta go, Henry.”  
“Walt?”  
“Yeah?”  
“Don’t do anything stupid.”  
But Walt just hung up and got back to the car.

The first thing he noticed when he entered the parking lot of the Tornado’s motel was a black SUV with plates from Iowa. Not Philly, Walt thought, but the first SUV with tinted windows I’ve seen today.  
He parked behind the building so they wouldn’t notice the Sheriff’s car directly. If they were there. If it was really their car.  
Walt knew that he should probably call the Sheriff’s station. Don’t do anything stupid. Sometimes you just had to do something bad to prevent something worse from happening.  
He asked once more for a list of motel guests. There was one couple who checked in two days ago, and two guys who checked in three days ago. Walt looked at their names and raised an eyebrow. Gotcha.  
“What can you tell me about these new guests?”, he asked.  
The receptionist, a woman in her forties, looked with a dull expression at him. “I don’t know, Sherriff. I wasn’t here when those guys checked in. The couple though… they were kinda shabby. You know, we’ve a lot of guys just coming through here. Staying a night because they don’t wanna sleep in the car. But those were, y’know, junkies or something. Like really-“  
“Thanks.”

The right thing would’ve been to call this in and wait until Branch or the highway patrol was here, just in case. He should’ve asked the receptionist to call the guy who was there when the other guys booked the room, but he didn’t. He asked for both keys for the rooms where the guys were staying and went back outside. It was around lunchtime and Walt noticed how tired and hungry he was. It didn’t matter.

The two guys, who wrote that their names were Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, rented the rooms number six and seven. Walt stood in front of the latter and listened carefully for any sound but the only thing he could hear was the distant blaring of a TV.  
As noiseless as possible he opened the door with the key. He opened the door slowly and unholstered his revolver. Then he peeked into the room.  
It was empty. But there was something…  
Before Walt could even enter the room and examine the thing that caught his attention, he heard a faint noise behind him and turned around. It was then that something smashed against his head and everything went black.

There were no dreams in the darkness.  
Only images of the previous evening came to his mind.  
It was a little after ten and he and Vic were the only ones left in the station. The paperwork was almost done and when she knocked he assumed she just wanted to call it a night and say goodbye.  
She came into the room and handed him the incident report she had written.  
“Walt?”  
He looked up.  
“Can I talk to you for a sec?”  
“Sure.”, he answered even though he wasn’t sure at all.  
She sat down right next to him on his desk and Walt leaned back a little. “So?”  
“I’m getting a divorce.”  
There was a moment of silence and Walt realized that she wanted him to say something. “Okay.”  
“You know… sometimes you’ve reason to look at your life and think about how it looks like and how you want it to look like. And maybe you see that there’s a huge difference there. Sometimes there are things you can’t change anymore. But sometimes, there’s so much you can change if you want to, you know.”  
Walt looked at his deputy, unsure of what to say. He had no idea why Vic would bring this up now. “Okay.”, he said again and nodded for her to go on.  
“I wanna be with you, Walt.”

He woke up because something nudged him softly.  
The pain in his head was violent and irritating up to a point that he felt like he couldn’t think at all. When he opened his eyes, it took him almost a minute to process what was going on around him.  
He was cuffed with his own hand cuffs and he felt duct tape over his mouth. The left side of his face, on which he was lying, felt sticky and warm, but he was certain that he received the blow to the right side. The blood probably ran down, meaning that he was already lying here for some time. And here was… the back of the SUV. It was dark, not only because of the tinted windows. It was getting late. How long was he in there? Hours.  
But the most important thing was that he wasn’t alone. Vic was lying right next to him. She had nudged him with her nose, so he would wake up. Or to see if he would ever wake up again. He could see bruises on her face but besides that she seemed to be okay. He felt relief. There were a few blood smears on her nose, probably where she’d pressed it against his face.  
The expression in her eyes went from concerned to glad and still a little concerned. Walt wished he could’ve smiled at her to let her know everything would be fine.

On the previous evening he was going to tell her that they couldn’t be together but before he could start to speak she had raised a hand and silenced him. “No, Walt, I don’t wanna hear your shitty reasons why it wouldn’t work out or whatever. I mean, if you don’t want to be with me – fine. I can live with that. But if the only thing that’s holding you back is one of your weird moral reasons – don’t. Don’t do that. I’m fucking serious here. It’s what I want and I’m sure as hell it's what you want, too.”

Their eyes locked and Walt tried to think of some way to get out of this situation. His revolver was gone, of course, so was his hat. But the latter seemed not that import right now.  
There weren’t many things he could’ve done, however, because the SUV stopped shortly after he had woken up.  
After a moment of silence, he heard another vehicle driving towards them and then stop. He heard the doors of the SUV crack open, slam shut and then distant voices.  
There was only one thing he could do now, before they’d come and get them out of the car. He spread his thumb from his left hand and pressed it to the ground. One strong jolt and he heard the sound of bones breaking. Vic’s eyes widened and he tried to nod soothingly at her. Now his thumb was broken and he could slip at least one of his hands out of the cuffs when he wanted to. He had expected his hand to hurt as hell but the stinging pain in his head was so overwhelming that he only felt a dull ache pulsing through his hand.  
Not even a minute later the back door of the SUV opened and two guys, probably ‘Dick’ and ‘Perry’, Walt thought, grabbed them and threw them out of the car on the ground.  
They were somewhere on a flat mesa, far away from any village or town. Only us, the gusting wind, dust and the upcoming darkness, Walt thought. His headache got worse with every minute and he felt like he’d pass out soon.  
He didn’t move but looked up and tried to figure out how many of them there were. Of course there were the two from the motel and their boss. No one else was to be seen but Walt wasn’t sure if the boss really drove on his own here. They always have a driver, don't they?  
“Who’s this asshole?”, asked the guy, who was most likely the boss, whose son Vic had killed and nodded towards Walt.  
‘Dick’, or ‘Perry’, handed him Walt’s Sheriff’s badge.  
“Well, fuck, how did you two idiots manage to include the fucking Sherriff here?”  
“He was sneakin’ around. We had to do somethin’ about it.”  
“So that’s why we’re here in the middle of fucking nowhere instead of the motel room I fucking booked?”  
“Yeah…”  
The boss, a middle-aged man with a bald head and a scar over his left cheek, grabbed Walt’s hair and dragged him up to his knees. White dots were dancing in front of his eyes and he tried to stay awake despite the raging pain in his head.  
They grabbed Vic and got her on her knees, too. Walt waited for the right moment to free himself from the cuffs. It had to be soon because he wasn’t sure how long he could stay conscious left alone able to knock somebody else out.  
The boss took out a knife and held it before Vic’s face so she could see it. “Y’know I had a lot of fun planned just for us two. But the lone rider here”, he pointed with the knife towards Walt, “made it impossible to stay in any fucking motel right now. Who knows if he’s really _lone_ or if he ordered some fucking backup? But, sugar tits, lemme tell you somethin’. Only because it’s not as much as I had planned doesn’t mean we’re not going to have any fun at all, y’understand me?”  
‘Dick’ and ‘Perry’ laughed.  
It was then that Walt jumped to his feet and knocked the boss out.

“Vic”, Walt had said on the previous evening. “You wanna tell me what’s going on?” He had figured that something was wrong and it was why Vic had come up with all of this.  
“That’s not the point here. The point is that I’m going to be a free woman soon. And I want you to think about if you want to be with me then or not. Do you hear me?”  
“Vic…”  
“I don’t wanna hear it.” And with that and a last smile, she left.

The surprise was on their side and Walt managed to wrestle one of the minions down, before he could get to his gun. Vic had understood the importance of this situation and had stumbled to her feet, too. But when she had tried to tackle the other minion right next to her, he was able to grab her instead. After all, she was still cuffed.  
When Walt got up again, the other man was holding his gun to Vic’s head. He probably didn’t want to shoot her because his boss would want that privilege but there was nothing that would stop him from shooting Walt. As if ‘Dick’ (or ‘Perry’) figured that out just now, he pointed the gun slowly at Walt. The latter raised his hands but nodded at Vic at the same time, who threw her head back and smashed in the other guy’s nose.  
But the gun went off and Walt felt the bullet hit his shoulder. Once more, the darkness swallowed him. The last thing he could think of was: “The driver. Where’s the driver? Look out for the driver, Vic.”

They told him later that the receptionist had called the police after Walt never returned with the keys and was nowhere to be found. Branch and Henry got there and found blood in one of the rooms. They figured that something had happened to Walt and gathered every available police officer to search for them both since it was likely that Walt had stumbled upon Vic and the mobsters had decided to take him, too.  
And then they received a call from Vic who had taken the cellphone from the guy she just had knocked out. The connection was pretty bad but her call came through and reached Ruby who was waiting anxiously at the station.  
It took them however until after midnight to trace the call and locate the mesa, where they found two dead bodies and four people unconscious but alive. Vic was lying next to Walt, as if she had wanted to put her arms around him.  
They later told him that she was surprised by the driver. She shot him with the same gun Walt was shot, but he got to her.  
When Walt regained consciousness in the hospital three days later, Henry was sitting by his side.  
“Vic?”, he asked and his voice sounded hoarse and dull.  
Henry took his unharmed hand and squeezed it carefully. “Walt. I’m sorry.”

**Author's Note:**

> How about a fluffy alternative ending? Interested?


End file.
